Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Skilling

The line reads like a master class in corporate misdirection: admit just enough to sound transparent, then bury the meaning in a fog of finance-speak. "I sold some shares" is the fact people latch onto in a scandal because it’s legible and moralized: insiders selling looks like fleeing a burning building. Skilling immediately blunts that instinct with "but on a net basis", a phrase that doesn’t clarify so much as relocate the argument to an accountant’s spreadsheet, where blame can be amortized. "Significantly increased my ownership" is the rhetorical payoff, offering loyalty as a numeric artifact rather than a behavior.

The specific intent is defensive and prosecutorial-proofed. It’s not "I didn’t sell", which can be disproved; it’s "net", a term that lets you smuggle in stock options, grants, restricted shares, or indirect holdings. You can move pieces around, claim a larger total position, and still be cashing out at the moments that matter. The subtext is: stop looking at the transactions you understand and trust the ones you don’t.

Context is Enron-era shareholder theater, when executives needed to project conviction while the company’s story was unraveling. This sentence performs faith without risking truth. It’s calibrated for analysts, journalists, and jurors alike: technically coherent, emotionally reassuring, and strategically incomplete. The cynicism isn’t just in what’s said; it’s in how "ownership" gets recast from a moral stake in a company’s future into a malleable PR metric.